


turning crimson (some reaction)

by meritmut



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Ben also needs a hug probably, Canon Divergence, Character Study, Dark Rey, Dark Side Rey, F/M, Rating May Change, Rey Needs A Hug, Rey says yes, Unresolved Emotional Tension, diverges at the throne room
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-27
Updated: 2018-06-27
Packaged: 2019-05-29 14:45:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,411
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15075404
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meritmut/pseuds/meritmut
Summary: The way he looks at her now is so terribly soft, like she is all his dreams made flesh, like he would give her an empire if she'd only ask.





	turning crimson (some reaction)

**Author's Note:**

> i will lock the doors to this house  
> keeping the vermin out until i feel safe  
> until i feel something  
> i feel nothing  
> — iamx, 'turning crimson'

“Don’t touch me,” she says, the first time he reaches to help her up off the floor. There’s blood on her lip and a graze across her chin, an animal snarl twisting her features into something vicious, but her eyes are cold and her presence in the force is almost  _void_  as she rises to her feet without his assistance and adopts a low guard, ready for him again.

 

-

 

“You offered to teach me,” Rey recalls as the remnants of the Resistance flee into hyperspace aboard the  _Falcon,_  leaving her behind aboard the enemy’s listing flagship.

 _They don’t know you’re here,_  some small, relentlessly hopeful part of her whispers, pushing back against the hurt of being left once more, but there must be something of Snoke’s foulness lingering in the air—some insidious remnant of his power that refuses to die: it clings to every breath she takes, pours into her lungs like miasma and takes hold from the inside out until Rey is shaking in the grip of the dark. Soon, that voice of hope withers, and another rises up in its place.

 _They’ve left you behind,_ it tells her, _of course they did: they never cared, you were never more than a means to an end to them and you failed, you failed, you failed—_

 

_-_

 

“You did well today,” he remarks, and Rey glances up to see the back of him as he disappears into the armoury. When he emerges, he’s looking anywhere but at her.

“I lost,” she dismisses his gruff praise with a shrug and turns away to continue her cool-down routine. She can feel his eyes on her, then, but she dismisses them too.

“You lasted longer than yesterday,” he returns bluntly, and she thinks  _ah, that’s more like it._  He always tempers his approval with criticism now, ever since he learned how resistant she is to praise; how much she resents it—if only because, deep down, she hates it less than she pretends.

 

-

 

“I did.” He’s trying so hard to hold himself together, to match her composure. He forgets she sees through him more clearly than Snoke ever could.

“Did you mean it?” Her voice is flat in her ears. Cold, she thinks. Like a dead thing.

“Of course.”

Rey turns to look at him, putting all thoughts of the Resistance—of the friends she thought she’d made, of the belonging she had begun to hope she’d found—from her mind. They mean nothing to her now. Plainly, she never meant anything to them.

 _You’re nothing._  Part of her still wants to kill him for that.

“Do you still mean it?”

Will she leave, if he doesn’t? Will he let her?

 _Let me?_  Something savage burns in her veins.  _Let him try and stop me._

She doesn’t think he would, if she tried. She isn’t a prisoner, and the way he looks at her now is so terribly  _soft,_ like she is all his dreams made flesh, like he would give her an empire if she'd only ask. But if she did try to leave—where would she go? Her options have narrowed, and since the idea of fleeing back to Jakku is unthinkable there’s really only one course left to her at all.

“I do,” Ben answers solemnly.

It comforts her a little, that she knows his true name while he will never have hers.

If he wants to make her strong, wants to make her  _more_ , then she will let him. Let him think her strength is testament to his tutelage; let him think she stays because she is still the girl she was when she came, weak enough to fold for the meanest scrap of kindness. She’ll take whatever he has to give—all of it; she will let the dark in and grasp every answer, every truth it promises, and then she will use them to make herself armour.

She will not be left again. She will not be  _alone_ again.

She will be untouchable.

She will be safe.

 

-

 

Her quarters have a mirror on the closet door.

It takes her days to notice it, partly because the wardrobe is fitted seamlessly into the wall to conserve space, and partly because it takes her that long to wrap her head around actually having  _quarters_  of her own.

Her reflection makes her flinch now. She avoids it where she can, too afraid of what she might find if she looks into her own eyes again; of the reminder that she is more than the fire of the Force inside her, that she is still flesh and blood and bone, the unloved, unwanted creature who has watched everyone she ever cared about walk away from her.

And so, on the third day, when she finally tugs open the closet and sees the rows of standard officers’ wear hanging inside, and her own face looking back from the mirrored pane on the inside of the door, for a moment she can only stand there and stare.

Then she puts her fist through the glass.

 

-

 

 _Swear to me you’ll never leave,_  she wants to ask, to  _demand,_  but it’s just the foundling in her talking—the abandoned child who never got over the fact that her parents didn’t want her. She refuses to admit such weakness, even (or perhaps especially) to him. He’s seen too much of her already, parts of her that hadn’t known the light of day since she buried them beneath the sand.

Does he think she will thank him for that? No—she could feel it, when he took the things that he had found inside her head and forced her to see them too: he expected her to hate him for it. He was  _ready_ for it, for her to hate him, but he had wanted so much to make her see that she was just like him in all the ways that mattered, even if that meant making her despise him, he didn’t care so long as she stayed.

There’s no room left in her for hate now, but there isn’t much room for anything else either.

 

-

 

One of the deck officers calls her  _Madam Ren_  and she corrects him with the end of her staff pressed to his larynx, accompanied by a jagged spikein the Force around her that makes the entire bridge staff wince.

Her name is Rey: Rey from nowhere. Rey, the no one.

Her name is all she has left, the last thing she carried with her out of the desert. She has no use for his.

 

-

 

“I’m not your apprentice,” she tells him. “Not like...”

Her empty hand gestures at the space where Ben had knelt before the throne he now occupies, and she hopes her message is clear.

_Not like you were his._

He can teach her, he can be as hard on her as he likes—and she hopes he will be—he can hurt her and berate her and bring all his thunderous strength to bear against her if it will make  _her_ stronger in the end, but she won’t debase herself for him, won’t surrender what even Jakku hadn’t managed to take from her.

“I won’t be lower than you. I won’t—”

He can see into her mind: he knows all the things she  _won’t_ , and he nods.

“I know.”

His acquiescence takes the fight out of her, for now, but Rey sees into his mind as well. She sees the things he cannot, or will not, say.

 

-

 

She supposes a report must reach him from one of the maintenance droids, that she has destroyed all the reflective surfaces in her rooms and is refusing to permit their repair, but he says nothing of it.

He says nothing, either, when she appears some mornings with marked shadows under her eyes and a voice gone hoarse from screaming, even though she knows her nightmares had bled over the bond and kept him up. Ben pushes her as hard as always and when she finally returns to her bed that evening and collapses promptly into a deep and untroubled sleep, she is almost grateful to him.

Some nights she hears him screaming too. It reminds her of the storms that used to batter her little bolthole in the desert, filled with a pain her human heart couldn’t possibly comprehend.

Sometimes he cries her name. Sometimes he just cries.

If he ever hears her weeping, he says nothing of that too.


End file.
